Keeping your employees engaged is critical, both for your employees and your organisation. Engaged employees are more productive, more dedicated and committed and more likely to stay. On the other hand, disengaged employees are unproductive, less dedicated and more likely to leave in the short-term. They may even sabotage the efforts of others, or introduce negativity in the workplace! Other outcomes such as the loss of productivity in itself is a huge issue with massive economic repercussions. For example, lower productivity in Singapore’s service industry is costing more than S$36.5 billion annually, according to poll results published in July 2017 by Straits Times. In fact, research has shown that Singaporeans are the least engaged employees!
To get you and your organisation back on track to having engaged employees, here are 4 strategies you can implement to enhance the employee experience.
1. Sufficient and regular feedback from immediate managers
Not surprisingly, employees across research studies have stated that they don't receive sufficient regular feedback from their direct managers, thus potentially creating dissonance in their work tasks and their perceived performance. What does sufficient and regular mean here?
Sufficient feedback might be about the meaningfulness of it, in that feedback allows someone to act or change in a way that helps them. It could also be about the specificity of feedback given, and if details lead to greater clarity of what needs to be done.
When it comes to performance feedback, not only does it have to be timely, but regular. From a leader’s point of view, it might seem that regular feedback is akin to having a check-in or update about an employee’s progress, but it’s more than that. Have you considered that from your employee’s point of view, hearing about their performance consistently from you, increases their trust in you as well? It’s as if they know you have their back, and your eye on their work facilitates your helping role in their development. The bottomline message is, you know what’s going on with them - in that you’re looking out to praise them, and not only penalise them.
By introducing regular feedback sessions, leaders will be able to connect with their direct reports to let them know how they’re performing, in a timely manner, as opposed to delayed feedback which can cause friction in the form of unclear expectations.
2. Increase opportunities for learning and development
Deloitte’s human capital trends report found that learning opportunities are one of the biggest drivers of employee engagement. In this light, increasing the amount of opportunities for your employees to learn and develop their skills will not only keep them engaged, but will also help your organisation in return as your employees will be kept up-to-date with relevant skills and expertise.
The latest skill sets to be developed are of no surprise, as developments in technology are exponentially making more jobs redundant - but also creating new ones in the process. Are we future-proofing our employees by preparing them ahead of time?
3. Clearer career road maps
Imagine driving on a road one day, and suddenly fog surrounds you and your car. There's no way to see what’s 500 meters ahead, so the options are to either stop or proceed with caution.
When people in your team are not engaging with their work, or are proceeding with caution, there’s a good chance that they might not have a clear idea of how to proceed. These employees might be the ones who hesitate to take on more projects, or volunteer for that cross-functional exposure opportunity. They might even develop the perspective that development opportunities are limited in the organisation.
When either of these outcomes happen, do you think employees are likely to be engaged with the business, with the organisation’s purpose, and with their daily work?
Having a clear career road map helps employees stay engaged, and also helps your organisation with its talent management pipeline. If you haven’t done so, think about introducing dedicated, one-to-one career planning sessions within your team. Employees will feel cared for and know that they’ve something to strive for.
4. Equip your leaders with envisioning and enlisting skills
It goes without saying that one of the top reasons of disengagement, as cited by employees, is poor leadership. Without strong leaders who know how to articulate a shared vision and then enlist the rest of their teams to buy into the vision, employees will likely feel disengaged with the organisation gradually as work is operational and task-specific, not necessarily inspiring or transformational all the time.
Having a sense of purpose increases engagement in the workplace. Clearly communicating your organisation’s purpose to your employees can help them identify more closely with the purpose and stay more engaged. One quick strategy to implement is for leaders and managers in your organisation to undergo Executive Coaching to fast track their leadership growth, for specific skills to paint a collective future for employees, and then getting their buy-in to commit to that future.
Other than engagement, change management is a large part of the employee experience. Download our whitepaper, 9 Enablers of Successful Organizational Change, to leverage on critical change levers today.
